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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the huge adoption improvements, there is also a dose of reality check required.

There are several domains where C++ never managed to displace C, and likewise the same seems bound to happen with Rust towards C and C++, regardless of safety improvements.

Khronos API definitions, the whole GPGPU ecosystem including vendor tooling, all major runtimes and compiler frameworks, consoles devkits, are few domains where Rust has yet to have a presence.

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Rust seems tailor made for a compiler framework. The issue is how often do new ones come along?

In 40 years, we have GCC and LLvM. How long until something comes along to displace them in any language? Nobody is really trying to “rewrite it in Rust” the LLVM platform (even though Rust itself relies on it). There is Cranelift of course but it is not really trying to be LLVM.

All GUI domain seems to be one big state, and that is the kind of place Rust refuses to interact with easily.

That's not true. There are many GUI libraries for Rust.

There are. You can do it. It's just that the language fights you on it.

Not really, there’s two models that work. The react model and the immediate model. The whole class inherits widget hellscape is not, no loss there. That route inevitably leads to bugs that are hard to find and fix because of all the weird state buried in inherited types.

Global mutable state is difficult to handle correctly and Rust forces you to think through the consequences. There's no shortage of patterns for safely working with it, but you can't take the easy (and unsafe!) way out.

Sort of. Last time I looked, about a year ago, there were a bunch and all of the ones I looked at/tried seemed really awkward to use. I don’t love Qt either, but in C++ land it’s a pretty reliable way to slap together a simple UI that doesn’t require a whole lot of ceremony.

They are just far far from mature. Your best bet for rust gui is still Qt bindings.

I really like egui. People talk about it not being professional because it is raster graphics and doesn't have native widgets, but neither of those things are anywhere on my customer's priority list.

Time will tell if Rust GUI libraries will be able to mature but maturity is different topic.

What about Slint? It is stable and used by real software.

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